Book "Ceibal in the society of the 21st century" was published.

On June th 27th we launched the book “Ceibal in the society of the 21st century - References for parents and educators” (only in spanish, at the moment), of which I had the great pride of being compiler and coordinating the production.



As we say in the introduction:

CEIBAL Plan is a great bet of Uruguay for equity, democratization of knowledge and improving education. According to the schedule, in 2009 it will finish the delivery of portable personal computers to all primary schoolchildren and teachers in the country, while running a process of updating the education system to the reality of the times.
Children are receiving owned computers for use at school, and also in their homes, opening the possibility that its use gets shared within the family. In turn, through a huge technical effort that takes the country at the forefront in terms of connectivity, the CEIBAL Plan is carrying out internet access not only to schools but also households. This will offer to the entire community a new opportunity to learn basic computing, accessing information of interest, and engage in exchanges with other actors and agencies of society.
Within this framework, it becomes more important the effort that the country has been operating to provide services to citizens via the Internet, what is known as "electronic government". This book seeks to generate discussion about the new possibilities for the community and offer some elements for exploiting them.
(...)

The first chapter is an overview of the Plan, developed from the standpoint of the team that is responsible for defining its educational policies. This vision is complemented in Annex 2: "Educational Project".
Chapter 2 seeks to provide a historical perspective of the Plan, its origins, evolution and implications, mainly from the standpoint of social impact that is generating and that can be achieved in future.

The book was produced and printed with the support of UNESCO.

We tried to reach as much people as possible, offering different readings through photographies, illustrations, sockets, etc.

(come on dad, get the laptop that it doesn't byte)

You can download it online here (pdf, in spanish).
You can access more material about the book in www.ceibal.edu.uy/gobiernoelectronico.

Hope to have the chance to translate the material into English soon.

To launch the year with humor… gabouy’s predictions

Originally published by Pablo Flores on Fri, Jan 18th, 2008
Translated by Paul D. Spradling

Very good forecasts for the year by gabouy. I copy below what he has to say regarding Plan Ceibal:

"The Ceibal Plan obtains national scope. Hordes of volunteers will be traveling to the interior to collaborate in one way or another. The state will realize it has 'N' unpredicted items with hidden costs, and will launch a ‘Give a Laptop’ or money or an hour of class campaign to collaborate with the plan. The first case of child pornography associated with the plan will be made public by the end of Q3, but will be buried by the national media. Cyber cafés will gain popularity in the interior, and as a consequence the ‘mate’ and ‘matera’ items will be created in Second Life. Some hacker in Paysandú will be able to boot a stripped-down version of XP, only to show it can be done. He will have driver issues."

If you would like to see all predictions, here’s the link.